time to listen

A few posts back, I mentioned how our pastor is challenging us to observe sabbath.  He says, "pick a time, pick a place, and enter in."  Don't get all hung up on the details--does it have to be a whole day?  does it matter which day??  Sometimes we get caught up in the particulars and don't actually practice sabbath.

What is sabbath?  As I've learned from my pastor, it is stopping, resting, playing, listening.  Stopping...all the things that pull on you day in and out.  That could be working at the office, or cooking dinner or whatever.  Resting...slow down, take a nap, whatever is restful to you.  Playing...that means different things to different people.  It could mean taking a walk, playing monopoly with your kids, or dancing around your living room.   Listening...this might be the most important.  We need to slow down, change our regular mode, do something different than normal in order to have the space to listen.  We need to listen to God.  What is He saying to us?

Well, I've been doing a bunch of reflecting on sabbath lately and not a lot of practicing it.  VBX next week.  Hubby's back pain affecting life.  blah, blah, blah.  Yes, it's busy and stressful right now, and time is short--but all the more reason for sabbath.

Today I grabbed an hour by myself.  Three hours would have been better.  A full day would have been lovely.  But rather than whine about how an hour was all I had, I stopped.  And entered in.  And listened.  And ate a cinnamon crunch bagel--mmmmmmm.

And God was there with me.  He spoke gentle words to my soul.  He helped me align my perspective to His as I journeyed into the day ahead.  It would have been a different day without that hour in His presence.

I am unwrapping the gift of my mini-sabbath today with Emily at chatting at the sky with the hopes of encouraging you to stop, rest, play and listen.  Pick a time, pick a place and enter in.

Company Girl Coffee 6.11--pickle pride and paint

I can't believe it's June 11.  I should be more stressed than I am...Vacation Bible Experience (VBX) is just over a week away and I am in charge.  I love, LOVE! VBX.  But, we are not ready yet and now is push time.  Yet, I feel relatively calm, I'm not working too crazily, and am getting time with my family.  I am not getting time to blog or read blogs--but that will come.  It's mostly on the post-VBX list. :)  But today I wanted to give a quick update and check in with the Company Girls.

First, I want to tell you how proud I am of Pickle this week.  She is a lot of wonderful things, but risk-taker is not usually one of them.  She prefers to know in advance how everything will go before she decides to proceed.  Obviously, she doesn't always get that preference, but when she can opt out of situations that are completely out of her comfort zone, she often does.  As I've mentioned before, she is heading to a new school for high school next year, and that alone is a bit anxiety producing.  This school has an excellent (6x state champion) volleyball team.  She casually mentioned to us that she'd like to play.  She has never pursued any athletic endeavors--she was a dancer only.  She has little volleyball experience--basically only PE class.  We all sort of dismissed the idea, thinking that she might be out of her league on this one.

Then I helped with Field Day at the elementary school and met the PE teacher there who helps with the volleyball program.  She asked if Pickle played and told me of the C team that often doesn't have cuts.  Hmmm.  Pickle dismissed the news--saying she had given up on the idea.  Fine.

Fast forward to this week, when a discussion about keeping fit led to Pickle saying that she still wanted to pursue volleyball.  We hop on the internet and find out the volleyball camp was (of course) this week. She had missed half of it--but hubby was able to find out she could attend for the last two days.  SO, my non-risk-taker daughter, with no volleyball experience, knowing nobody, halfway through a camp that the girls had been at for days--walked into the gym and gave it a go.  She was super-nervous, but decided that it was worth pressing through the anxiety.  That is the part I am proud of--that at this point in her life she has begun to figure out that sometimes you push through fear to pursue a dream. 

And, she liked it.  She is sore and bruised--but she did it.  She made a new friend or two.  She has plans to work hard this summer in preparation for the late-summer tryouts.  I don't care if she plays on the team (okay--I'd love it, cause it's my favorite sport!), but what I'm proud of is that she is going for it!

Today, we are off to a VBX work day.   Tomorrow too.  We are working hard to paint and build and set the stage for a great adventure!  We will be doing some of this:

and this:

and this:

can you believe they let me touch power tools??

and lots of this:

What are you doing today??

pulling up weeds

Am I seriously going to post about weeds on a Tuesday?  The day where I try to join in with emily and others at chatting at the sky and celebrate everyday gifts?

Yes, I am.  And I thought I was pushing it celebrating laundry a few weeks back...

Last night, I was a weeding machine. (OK, that might be a huge overstatement, but let's go with it.)

We have a large mulch area around our patio that I may or may not plant something pretty in one day.  In the meantime, the grass grows in it very well.  Our yard is struggling to green up this year, but large tufts of very green grass are thriving in the mulch bed.  Have you ever tried pulling up grass?  It is all connected by a web of underground roots.  It doesn't just come straight up.  A week or so ago, Bubba and I made an early Saturday morning of starting the job of getting the grass out of there.  We made progress but there was a long way to go.  I kept meaning to get back to it...but hadn't yet.

Yesterday was HOT--record breaking heat in Colorado.  We don't have air-conditioning (not that unusual here, but yesterday was one of those days you wonder why...) so we ate our dinner outside on the patio.  Our patio is cool in the evenings--something I love about our home.  After dinner, we sat around chatting for awhile.  As we talked, I pulled a tuft or two of grass.  No plans to weed that evening.

But I didn't stop.  My family disappeared.  I had no gloves, was still wearing a skirt, and was wearing hubby's way-too big-for-me flip flops.  (I took them from him for a "sec" cause I was barefoot).  I was definitely making a strong weeding fashion statement.  If I stopped to go get my stool to sit on or to change my clothes, I probably wouldn't have come back to the job.  I just kept pulling.

part of the pile of grass and roots I left in my wake...

And I finished the whole mulch bed!!! Just kidding--do you KNOW how long that will take?  But I kicked it's butt--and the grass that still lives in the bed is seriously afraid of me now.

And I enjoyed it.  Not the weeding per se, but the cooler evening weather, the slight breeze, the burst of drive I was feeling when I didn't "have to" but wanted to.  I enjoyed the satisfaction of seeing not only tufts of grass come up, but long roots that were connected to other tufts of grass.  And the quiet.  And after a day of lots of thinking at work--the mindless task of pulling grass.

I was able to reflect--thinking things like:

It doesn't do any good to just get rid of what others can see...the roots need to be dealt with if we want to really tackle the problem.  Hmmmm.

We want green grass in most of our yard.  But green grass in the mulch area is no longer grass, it's weeds.  The right thing in the wrong place is no longer the right thing.  Double-hmmmm.

So today I am celebrating a small burst of desire to weed, the satisfaction of working with my hands instead of my brain, and a quiet, cool hour of reflection.

Even if I was less than lady-like squatting in my skirt, with dirt in my fingernails and wearing way-too-big shoes.

We are not ants.

"Ants don't sleep."

That's what Bubba read me from the cool facts app on my ipod as we drove down the road.  Really?? I didn't know that...although I do know that those little guys are busy, busy little guys.

On Saturday, Bubba and I were weeding (you know, pulling the grass out from where we don't want it to grow even though it's not growing well where we want it to).  Some of the grass was growing from below a stepping stone, so we lifted it up.  We found ant-land.  We saw tunnels and ants running around.  We saw larva and as soon as we lifted the stone the ants scurried over to the larva and carried it deeper under ground.  It was cool and gross at the same time--perfect entertainment for a young man.  They were working hard and fast.

see the larva?

Then two nights ago--Pickle found a few ants in our kitchen.  We looked closely and realized they were just a few of the many parading through our home.  We followed the parade backwards and learned they were marching along the crack of our wood floor and carpet, along the wall, the crease at the bottom of the stairs, again along more wood floor and carpet to the front door.  That's a long way for those little legs!  Those ants don't stop!

(Sorry, insect-lovers, but armed with super-spray, we happily killed them all. )

Ants don't sleep.  Ants don't stop.  They keep going, keep marching, keep working.  They jump into action when a crisis arises and the babies need to be carried below.  The are willing to walk and walk and walk in search of some crumbs.

We are not ants.  I know you know this.  But do you?  How do you live your life?  Do you act like an ant?  Do you think you just can't stop?  Are you afraid of stopping?  Feel guilty for it?  Do you only stop when the super-spray of exhaustion or illness takes you down?

We've been talking a lot about stopping at church lately.  We've been talking about Sabbath.  Our pastor has been leading us down a road of exploring the gift of Sabbath that could just revolutionize our lives and relationships with God.

I can't wait to share more with you on this...but first:  Are you too much like an ant?  Do you practice Sabbath?  Talk to me!